u/1800COCAINE

Che sotto l’acqua è gente che sospira,

Inf. 7.118

Stags leaned into a teething wind their antlers hooped with velvet and the snow drifted ghostwise beneath a sky netted with bats; mute wings palpating in the pink gloom. Under the first star of evening the men bivouacked at the eaves of chestnut wood by a ring of stones. Atop a boulder sat the Riddler tuning an English guitar.

Micajah squatted beside the flames rotating a fowl on a blackening length of a bayonet with the fat drizzling on the coals, Burgess sing us a tale. The Riddler held out a hand as if he would read the stars as notes tucked into the ether and this is what he sang.

The river Styx is in the sky
It’s borders broken wide
A serpent swam over the flood
To tell me what she’d done

And he said,
And he said,
And he said,

The river’s daughter
Sang a prayer into the water
To drain the light
From everyone’s eyes

Now the king’s men have drown
A land without a crown

Lean an ear to the serpents fang
Lend a voice to what he sang
Tories folded into the flood
Water marbled with their blood

The river’s daughter
Sang a prayer into the water
To drain the light
From everyone’s eyes

Now the king’s men have drown
A land without a crown

The river’s daughter sang
A circle into the sand
And it filled with breath
Cold melody of death

water holds their hands
water folds their hands

[663](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/C6lqIKFRrH)

Sangue sitisti, e io di sangue t'empio
Dante Purgatorio, Canto XII, line 57

A delta of black pebbles, a billowing fog river and owls within their wingspans smoked with moonlight.Rats crisscrossed the clover then rose toward the twist of leaves with their jaws flexing and claws scratching against talon and wind.

Davey eyed the Riddler with small watery eyes glinting in the firecast.
Come now Davey you know quite well in order for you to exist there must be some record.
I ain’t mixin words with you. You’re a riddler. Just don’t be makin no record of me in your book.
I don’t wanna be inked is all. Davey it is not up for you to determine the witness as you are a
witness yourself if only to the darkness of the within and the darkness of the without.
I have a mind not to be captured. Yes, Davey I understand; but as you are a part of my
knowledge so of that which you are to me will be expressed for there is no territory in the
uncreated night of reason off limits to me. Each man is only known in relation to the other
like notes on a scale. And it will be this way Davey and not some other way for the witnessing
is the chord and we are bound to its dark rich melody. The Riddler stood before the fire and
his shadow spread to the east where a bull moon crowned him with horns.

2288 Crit, https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/EwFQBRCq10

[2275](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/0ntRHkGoU8)
[938](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/Q47zmqNqSl)
[486](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/JcaNqUdVwQ)

Jiggles

1. Wood Pig

Above the cellar stairs a pink neon sign hummed and glared Jiggles. It bathed Wood Pig in a lurid rose as he tilted and lumbered up the stairs with a keg under each arm bumping and scuffing the wainscoting with each wheezing breath. When he crested the stairwell he set them down with a thud and lit his lucky Marlboro Red. His wet eyes narrowed at the junkie crumpled up at the far table with an acoustic guitar, but the fog machine belched and the sleepy scab of filth became obscured.

Wood Pig blew a train of smoke rings choo-chooing across the floor and adjusted his belt over his paunch. His grimace turned to a grin when the music kicked and jutted as a glossy greased and lasciviously lubricated Palmer emerged from the smoke in a hip circling ballet. Wood pig arched his brows as she arched on the chrome pole in her patent leather stilettos. Her teased hair bobbed and wiggled as she slinkily pivoted flexing and elongating the swerve of her body into a crawl. Wood Pig made a wet popping sound with his lips and glided under the bar with an oddly acrobatic dexterity for a portly bartender and plopped a cherry into his mouth and tongue whipped the stem into a knot with celerity and preternatural precision.

Wood Pig sighed as Palmer heels clicked clacked off stage. He eyed the junkie, took up a broom, and ducked under the bar. Wood Pig’s shadow fell over the soporific sod as he raised the broom and staved the table and the junkie flashed awake and fell to the floor and scrambled up clutching the guitar to his chest. Wood Pig blasted him through the exit door, and the junkie fell headlong into the trash.

2. Palmer

Palmer slipped off her bracelets, her rings, her flats. She unbuttoned her bomber, her flannel, her 501s. She spun before a three panel mirror and the three Palmers whisked. This one’s shadows curved along her spine, this one’s hands pulled to her throat, and this one’s inner thigh had a smudge of mascara. Palmer paused. She rotated her leg wide and sucked her thumb. Bubbles of saliva popped under her nail and she rubbed tiny circles around the smudge. The spot glowed pink as the panties she pulled down over her thighs her pink toe nails. She teased and misted her hair with hairspray and put her hands on her hips and smiled her gap-tooth smile and rapidly winked with one eye then the other again and again hypnotically fanning her lashes.

From the makeup counter she took an enormous velour puff and she pressed her lips into a thin line and dusted a cloud of powder on her face. She relaxed her lips and they were wet swollen and red. Palmer jerked and pumped a nearly empty plastic jug of baby oil and slathered until the light ran liquid along each dimple each tendon each curve. She took a pinch of silver glitter and flicked it to the ceiling and held out her arms and watched in the mirror as the sparkles fell and melted into her skin. She did the Twist on a terry cloth towel and stepped into eight inch stilettos. The tape read Def Leopard and was cued to Pour Some Sugar On Me. She bit her bottom lip pressed play and walked on stage.

3. Pauper Penury

Pauper Penury closed the women’s bathroom door at Jiggles. He unfolded a crumpled up Dixie cup and knuckled the faucet and slowly filled the cup to the brim. He blushed. The cup sloshed and he placed it on the toilet paper dispenser next to an Altoids tin. He got down on all fours and pressed his cheek against the cold linoleum and peered along the floor into the other stalls. His breath scattered a husk of cigarette ash. He stood up with sugar sand sticking to half his face. He slumped on the shitter. He opened the lid to the Altoids can. Inside rested a packet of folded wax paper, a spoon, a bic lighter, a q-tip, two pink twenty gauge needles, and a syringe with all the graduated markings buffed from use, and a fresh pack of Lucky Strike.

He bent the spoon into a deflated C or a candle stick holder and pinched and picked the cotton from the q-tip. He folded and pressed the cotton into a slab and rested it on his knee. He unfolded the wax paper and sifted it into the spoon with firm taps on its creased edge and placed the residuals back in the tin. He drew Jiggles’ tap water from the Dixie with the syringe and squirted and dripped it into the spoon and thumbed the lighter to a low flame. The spoon blackened and the water roiled and Pauper stirred the powder with the syringe plunger until it dissolved. He plugged the plunger back into the syringe and set a pink needle with a turn and kiss sucked the cap off.

He slid the slab into the spoon and sank the needle tip in the slab and drew up the mixture. His eyes crossed. He yanked off his belt clinched his arm at the crook and made a fist. A plexus of veins raised. He tamped a long rubbery one and ran a finger along it lengthwise as if to make sure it had bulged full and proper. The needle dented the skin. Pauper crumpled his brow. His red rimmed eyes transfixed then relaxed as he pulled the plunger back. His pupils popped wide like an umbrella as a tiny red flag aspirated into the warm amber shot and he injected slow and easy and loosened the belt cinch. Pauper’s head rolled back Adam’s apple to ceiling.

843

313

A man walked in rain on Via del Proconsolo beside the Bargello. He pulled the 12 foot glass doors apart and stepped inside the foyer. With each breath, his lithe ribs flexed palpable and discrete beneath his wet henley. He halted, and stood dripping from every rolled cuff and button, and chased the rain from his green Stetson with a couple firm pats on his jeans, and slid it back on with an automatic hand and fixed the brim with a tug.

He walked and wiped his chunky transparent green hornrims on a soft cloth which he produced as if by prestidigitation, and plopped his soft leather drawstring bag onto a bench before Michelangelo‘s Bacchus. The weighty brass pencil sharpener made spilled curlicues. He thumbed a black book and the cover page read, in a copperplate script, Lothar von Andal.

Lothar made two horizontal marks on the book’s vellum paper one at the top and one at the bottom and indexed 30 degrees from each dash mark on either side to format an isometric projection and he layed laid down the vertical lines to complete the planes of the rectangles.

Inside the box Lothar first placed his eye level horizon, and effortlessly expressed the action of the shifting gestures of the statue. He plotted the proportions in dots and constructed a working figurative armature in preparation. Lothar designed the composition by values with the darkest darks rendering the illusion of that which is closest so as to reinforce depth through pressure. He is a hand at drawing, and the crosshatching of the musculature followed the contours of each supple form with grace and elegance from its point of origin to its diffused insertion.

He closed the book and himself off from the world for no other would see the deft instrumentality of his handling. He shouldered the drawstring bag and his genius. He departed the Bargello and dissipated once more into the endless rain; a fume silhouette gliding along the Ponte Vecchio above the Arno.